The Giant Beastcast: Episode 269

Just a heads up, there's still no premium audio for last week's episode.

My mail has been fucked. Two lost packages since March, so many super late packages, and inconsistent or no tracking. I totally get it but it still sucks.

Did...did Jeff Bakalar go to camp at a Hydra cover story? “Camp Woebetide, brought to you by AIM”?

90% of my time watching the Beastcast these days is keeping an eye out for Tater.

👀

New AC looks like they just remade the last one with a Viking skin and stole more stuff from the middle earth franchise.

Kinda funny, for Odyssey they added a nemesis system lite, this one they are adding in the storming the castle stuff. Maybe the next AC game will have Orcs.

Does Abby's audio sound like it's fading in and out for anyone else? Especially when others are talking?

@lanechanger: They finally fixed it a few episodes ago, but it seems busted again sadly.

"First of all, I'm glad you're ok and I'm sorry you choked on a pork steak" - Vinny
"Thank you so much, Vinny, I was waiting for that ALEX and JEFF" - Abby
*pregnant pause*
"I didn't want to interrupt" - Alex
"I'm not.... I'm not sorry" - Jeff
Bahahaha.
Keep up the good work gang.

Secret Lab chair club!

The us postal service would run with a profit if it weren't for the requirement that they cover pensions 70 years in advance.

DUDE firepits are the best. Literally a thing I do almost every week in the summer. And, I'm 32. and I live in the city of Seattle, with like 2000 sqft back yard. firepits are the best!!!!

I 100% agree with Alex that its a shame about the USPS. I sell things on ebay occasionally and they ship really quickly most of the time, and any time I order something online if it comes through them its usually faster than any of the private companies. (UPS, Fedex, etc) I also used to work in shipping/receiving for a small business and the post office workers were always way more gentle with packages. Once saw a frustrated UPS guy literally throw around a couple of HP desktop boxes to make more room in the truck lol. Always felt bad for those guys, they seemed super rushed and underpaid.

Excellent first email. From my perspective, Giant Bomb crew is quite good at compartmentalized their private and work life (I don't have twitter so there's that).

So there was time when I felt like...well somebody's in a bad mood, I wonder what that's about...while listening to Bomb/Beastcast.

The polar opposite would be someone like Marc Maron, that dude will tell you everything which somewhat make me understand them better during the show.

Best return from the break in the history of the show?

Yah, what DO they do all day??

Jokes aside, personally I'm usually genuinely curious about how the industry works from the inside. For example a while back Patrick Klepek mentioned on a podcast that as critics they often have to play games they are reviewing at home which is overtime they are never compensated for - and that was really interesting to me because I never thought about it that way. I imagine getting a title to review in 3 days thats 40 hours long is kind of a nightmare, and you're also not getting paid for all those personal hours you put in. So in this extra weird home setup they are doing now I'm even more curious how they handle it technically - more as a technical look behind the scenes like how Vinny did a video on the Tricaster that one time, not a detailed minute to minute breakdown of their day.

Real bummer to hear Giantbomb wont be back in the office until next year.

New console launch streams are going to be really weird.

I was just drunk enough for the laundry talk i started laughing, yep wet sock off the floor right into a dryer, and I walk a mile to the laundromat. $2 for a wash and $4 for a dry, not sure how they figured that out

Where do people get the idea that assassins are ninjas? An assassination isn't necessarily stealthy, just a surprise attack. I'm glad AC has been branching out from pure stealth; mainly because I find stealth in most games to be intolerable. Either it's simplistic to the point of making no sense, or it becomes cumbersome, with very few games in-between. Not to mention that in every previous AC you could fight an entire army at once as they attacked you one at a time, so it wasn't very assassin-like there, either.

That said, some of the best new abilities have been assassin-related. That homing arrow is reaaaal dumb in a reaaaaal good way.

I completely disagree with this take. Setting aside that in order to launch a surprise attack one must have used a minimal amount of stealth to set it up, assassination is a lot more than just "a surprise attack."

Assassination is, in my mind, (a) targeted and (b) intimate, both of which AssCreed has missed the boat on for a long time now. Killing a bunch of generic NPCs, even if I'm technically killing them from the bushes or whatever isn't assassination, it's just run-of-the-mill murder. An assassination has a defined target and you preferably complete that assassination by killing your target and only your target.

Hitman is a game that understands this and does it really, really well. You get your little briefing telling you who your target is, and then you go through the level where you slowly learn things about your target - where they hang out, what they're doing, if they're fighting with a spouse or co-worker, that they really like a particular kind of sweet, etc. The point is, you sort of feel like you know this person by the time you kill them.

In Assassin's Creed you are not incentivized to learn anything about the people you are killing. Your targets barely look different than every other generic NPC, probably have the same basic combat skillset, and have nothing particularly unique to distinguish them other than an icon above their head saying "kill this person." For example, in Odyssey, I ended up killing more of the cultists by accident than I did deliberately. They just happened to be in the area I was fighting through and I didn't notice anything different about them until the message popped up that I killed them.

Abby is completely correct about the choking stuff, a lot of people die because they're too polite and try to go somewhere else to avoid embarrassment ( I learned all this at the summer camp I used to work at! Doing Wilderness first responder is the beeeessssttttt)

Glad you are ok Abby

Im loving GoT. Makes sense the crew hates it then 😂

No Man's Sky just arrived on Game Pass and there seems to be a large influx of players from that, the Nexus is always crazy busy, glad they're still adding stuff. Teleporters in freighters finally!

I'm glad that you're ok Abby. That must be frightening. Thanks for telling this story because I usually eat really fast and since I live alone I would never want to experience that kind of horror. I might have to change my eating habits.

WHAT? I'm from upstate NY and I know like 2 people that went to camp. I rode my bike around town with my dirty friends, built forts, vandalized abandoned cars etc. like kids are supposed to.

Alex compares Tsushima to Mad Max :O

... i love Mad Max...

I strongly disagree with the crews take on Ghost of Tsushima and even more disagree with Bakalar's take on paper mario. Paper mario is exactly what Ben hoped it wouldn't be, barely any RPG elements and extremely tedious combat wrapped in a pleasant and fun shell.

As per the ballot discussion, I didn't get my mail-in until two days post-election.

I was still able to vote luckily but still, pretty ridiculous.

Big fan of Bruce Sternum’s music

Where did Ben discuss it?

@haz_kaj: when he talked about what he hoped it would be on the Bombcast two weeks ago. I’m not sure if he has played it yet, because it is the opposite of what he wanted. Glad Jeff B is enjoying it though

Did Vinny casually mention on this show that Drew was going to become a pilot, or did I just imagine it? Drew ended Cloth Map recently and hasn't posted anything new on Twitter about what he was doing next, so I was curious.

@ohnogc: I think he started taking pilot lessons when he was still working at GB.

@ohnogc: Drew did get his private pilot license in January of this year. Maybe Vinny was just being a good friend by saying congratulations again because it's a pretty awesome thing to do!

Not trying to steal the Flight Simulator thunder but Balsa Model Flight Simulator from ex-Kerbal devs might be coming out in early access "soon".

https://store.steampowered.com/app/977920/Balsa_Model_Flight_Simulator/

Also I think we might not be that far off from some countries giving up on letter mail so you need a package delivery company to send anything (even letters).

@development: the only "camps" we have in upstate ny are old great camps or jesus camps. but yea building forts and army guy cosplaying in the woods

After I finished this Beastcast. I ran the Clean Tub feature in my laundry machine.

In this episode: Abby passes a saving throw versus death.

I'm with Vinny in thinking Assassins Creed should've changed the name a while ago. Desmond's story was the main thing relevant to that idea and with that train wreck done and dusted they should title it something different. You could call it something like "The Climbkiller Chronicles, League of Extraordinary Neck Stabbing, Animus House, Wake Me Up Before You Abstergo-Go."

There is valid criticism of the derivative nature of Ubisoft's open world games but I still appreciate the iteration they put into these kinds of experiences. Granted the only games of that ilk I've finished in the past several years were Far Cry 4 and AC Odyssey(loved them both) but I think what they seem to still do better than a lot of other studios in this space is making an open world power fantasy. For a recent example I beat Control last week and for as cool as that game is, I didn't feel powerful playing it. It gives you loads of cool powers sure and they even justify it in the narrative but no matter how much I upgraded them I felt as weak and fragile at the start of that game as I did at the end. Whereas in something like AC: Odyssey I felt like a badass as Kassandra early on and she only got more badass the further in the game I got even despite the enemies scaling in toughness. Then there's Horizon Zero Dawn which is a game that was blatantly biting off some of Ubisoft's design quirks and at the time that game felt years behind even that. Not trying to be an apologist for that company or anything, especially given their questionable ethics at the moment. But like I said at the top I can respect good iteration in game design, even for franchises that are getting long in the tooth. And for the record I still like those other 2 games, though I'd say the aesthetics of both do much of the heavy lifting for my personal enjoyment.

Made an account just to comment here and endorse Parsec. Can't put into words how good the damn thing is. I used it for 2 months when I had to travel to the other end of Europe for work. Had my fiancee boot up my computer every morning for me and I used it daily like that for work in the first half of the day and gaming in the other. It holds up so damn well. No lag. Not even that occasional hiccup you see once every 5-7 minutes with Stadia and xCloud. It just works.

I spend most of my day at my desk working on PC and I hate to spend my time there as well for gaming. Bought a Razer JungleCat and that's how I've been playing all my PC games. I tested Parsec on some really low internet speeds and the darn thing still connects and works as intended. I don't know how they do it.

Jump on it people, it's free. At least until someone decides to buy it. Probably Sony, because their current infrastructure is shit.

Man Abby's mic was really bad at times during this podcast.

I absolutely didn't go to camp and most of my friends as a kid didn't either. I don't recall it being the norm.

@bradley: You ok duder?